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Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

btctimes.com

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Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#391

Post by kortilla »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #294
Priem19 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By which I mean to say: the greedy rich wanting to preserve or increase their wealth at all costs is what got us into this mess. Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency pyramid scheme is going to do bugger all to improve that. No amount of wealth or technology will turn vice into virtue because: “If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're gonna get selfish, ignorant leaders.” —George Carlin Prosperity boils down to g…

To add to this, crypto communities _appear_ (I’d be pleased to be wrong here if anyone has examples) to be filled with people who are absolutely opposed to any kind of economic governance, if it’s not “let the magic hand of the market decide” they’re seemingly not interested.

Yes, they are opposed to having their assets diluted by a government they have no say in.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#392

Post by 3np »

graeme wrote: post #372
3np wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about spot trading volume on centralized exchanges, which is a completely different metric than "transactions" (regardless of if you want to interpret that as on-chain or not). Separately, Binance is a lot of bot-trading, and, outside of BN, USDT-heavy exchanges have questionable volume figures (wash trading and fake trades). USDT usage has indeed gone down in favor of other stable coins, and while Bin…

Could you elaborate on your methods or sources for determining actual volume of transactions?

As I mentioned, I think it's too ambiguous to talk about "transactions" if we want to compare something measurable - if you want to restrict yourself to on-chain transaction numbers or volume, you'd have to just look at the on-chain activity - I am just assuming BTC is dwarfing USDT here, but that's just a small part of the story. On-chain activity is also meaningless for what I guess you're after, since there's no reliable way to separate self-transfers from other transactions.

If we go by what your sources allude to - trades on centralized exchanges - it'd be a matter of summing up the trading volume for each par involving either asset on any side.

Let's first look at Binance for the past 24h. I get:

  BTC: 1.9 BUSD
  USDT: 3.8 BUSD
Not so far off from the 70/30 number. This is not so surprising though, as USDT is a popular base-pair on Binance - but this is way different than saying that Bitcoin rests on USDT. There are other stablecoins on Binance, and if trouble or further doubts of confidence comes to Tether, liquidity will migrate fast. Indeed, it already is, gradually.

If we look at more exchanges (here 31 in total):

  BTC: 7.6 BUSD
  USDT: 9.6 BUSD
In either way, claiming that Binance or even the sum of all exchanges represent the whole bitcoin economy is ludicruous. Consider that USDT is almost only used for off-chain trading on exchanges, where Bitcoin is transacted in a lot of other ways.

OTC transactions (even those run by exchanges, like Coinbase) are not included here, for example. Neither are payments, on-chain transactions, or L2. Some will argue (I don't) that derivatives markets like BitMEX (margined/settled in BTC) and CME (margined/settled in USD) are reasonable to include as well, which are huge in BTC and again negligible in USDT.

As for sources - any serious exchange provide APIs for trades, and there are vendors that aggregate them. Coindesk and Coinlib acquire APIs and data from such vendors, who base them on the self-reporting of exchanges.

---

I don't think there's any published recent study that looks at this properly. It takes effort or money to get the proper data, knowledge to model it, and time to compile it. Most of the people I know with the means are having their hands full with other stuff right now ;)

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#393

Post by FireBeyond »

kajumix wrote: post #119
hnrodey wrote: post #108

One of the reasons I'm bullish on Bitcoin over the next decade is precisely because of the anti-BTC sentiment on this board.

The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.

> The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique.

That's an ... amazingly blanket ... statement, for the countless thousands of words people here have said on the topic.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#394

Post by ALittleLight »

perl4ever wrote: post #387
ALittleLight wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is you have some amount of "worth" today, denominated in whatever you like. Maybe you have 100k USD in BTC or in cash. If you let your bitcoin ride, that's equivalent, modulo taxes, to buying bitcoin. Or, selling your bitcoin today is equivalent to choosing not to buy. The idea is that you shouldn't think "I already have some bitcoins, may as well let them ride" but instead think "Would it be better…

All else being equal, given that you turned $100 into $100K, you're much more likely to have $100K that you can afford to lose. Saying that the history of your investing shouldn't impact your choices is saying that your total wealth shouldn't affect your choices. But if I borrowed $100K against my home and it gets foreclosed and I'm homeless, that's very different from if I gambled $100 and got $100K whose loss will…

That's exactly the fallacy I was describing. Whether or not you can afford to lose money is completely independent of how much your initial investments cost. You will tend to make more money, provided you have some ability to predict, if you do what you predict is best based on the present and the future, compared to changing your decisions based on the origins of your money.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#395

Post by zadler »

jayd16 wrote: post #267
matheusmoreira wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we don’t need a completely trustless financial system outside of some libertarian ideal Who's "we" ? I certainly do need it.

Most people. Almost no one has it so how can we all need it?

That’s missing the point. You could have said the same thing about the internet. But we are not collectively making this decision based on politics, the market has decided that crypto is valuable.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#396

Post by canadianfella »

neckardt wrote: post #238
throw0101a wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization […] "Decentralization"? Bank of America Global Research just released a report today that said: > 1. Concentrated Ownership: About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts, and distribution is heavily skewed towards the largest accounts. By comparison, the latest Fed data suggests that the top 1% of Americans control about 30.…

> About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts This seems obvious to me. Many people have bitcoin wallets with only a little invested. In my case, I have a few wallets just to play around with. I assume all of those wallets count as "accounts" in the above, which would really drive down the amount of money the average account controls. However few people actually have wallets with large amounts of…

What’s the point of multiple wallets?

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#397

Post by tarsinge »

iijj wrote: post #122

Maybe I don't understand it correctly, but after having recently done my taxes, it seems to me you'd generate a capital gain or loss that has to be captured on IRS Form 8949 every time such a thing triggered bitcoin to be converted to USD, goods or services. Or is it some nudge-nudge-wink-wink situation where everyone, including the IRS, ignores such a thing unless the sums involved are large.

That’s what I don’t get too. Here is France the law is similar, and I can’t imagine card holders calculating the capital gains on every transaction. Here it requires taking a snapshot of your portfolio every time because you have to know the total value of the portfolio to calculate the taxable gain.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#398

Post by jayd16 »

zadler wrote: post #395
jayd16 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people. Almost no one has it so how can we all need it?

That’s missing the point. You could have said the same thing about the internet. But we are not collectively making this decision based on politics, the market has decided that crypto is valuable.

With the internet its easy to extrapolate value from most tasks. Cheaper, faster, easier, always available, available at a distance etc.

Why do I need a fully trustless system that is worse in every other category? Slow, more expensive, less consumer protection, etc.

At the very least its not obvious and the market has not spoken. Even people speculating use off chain exchanges, not the chain itself.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#399

Post by colinmhayes »

kajumix wrote: post #119
hnrodey wrote: post #108

One of the reasons I'm bullish on Bitcoin over the next decade is precisely because of the anti-BTC sentiment on this board.

The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.

Bitcoin is incredibly wasteful and has no genuine use case that isn't better served by ethereum2 or monero.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#400

Post by runeks »

realradicalwash wrote: post #291
tiborsaas wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> converted to fiat, and the fiat can be spent using a Visa Card That's an accounting detail most people won't care about. Perception matters more than technicalities.

if transactions were done in btc, each transaction would amass the typical fees - which are pretty high at the moment. converting btc to fiat to pay your visa card bill at the end of the month would be one transaction per month. that's a huge difference.

> if transactions were done in btc, each transaction would amass the typical fees […]

No. A transaction can be denominated in BTC without touching the blockchain. And settled at the end of the month through the blockchain.

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